The Backbone — Episode 6: From Finance to Founding an IoT Startup & Bootstrapping vs. Raising Venture Capital
Sacha Sawaya, Co-Founder and CFO at Litmus Automation
Welcome back to The Backbone: a journey inside finance at a startup. On this episode, I’m joined by Sacha Sawaya, Co-Founder and CFO at Litmus Automation.
For more background on the launch of this podcast, check out Introducing The Backbone!
I sat down with Sacha Sawaya, Co-Founder and CFO at Litmus Automation, an end to end cloud platform for connecting things to enterprise applications. Litmus is trusted by Fortune 500 companies to solve the growing complexities in Internet of Things.
Sacha is in charge of financial planning & analysis, investor relations, fundraising and various other functions within finance, human resources and operations. Prior to joining Litmus Automation, Sacha spent time working in private equity for Imperial Capital as a research analyst and working as an investment analyst for a group of prominent angels in Toronto, where he assessed a numerous deals on behalf of private investors. Sacha holds an undergraduate degree from Western University in Finance and a Masters of Science in Finance from the International University of Monaco.
On this episode of The Backbone, I chat with Sacha about:
- His journey into tech and co-founding Litmus, after roles in investment banking, asset management and finance;
- What Litmus Automation does;
- The challenges of founding an IoT company with a background in finance and things he would do differently if he could do it over again;
- Bootstrapping vs raising venture capital funding and making the most of the funds you raise;
- The importance of the finance function at an early stage technology company
We close things off with a quickfire round:
- Go to online resource for all things startup finance related
- Favourite productivity hack
- One thing you don’t leave the office before finishing
Take a listen:
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Check out previous episodes of The Backbone
Episode 1: Managing Churn & Being Private Equity Backed w/ Daniel Israelsohn, VP Finance & Operations at Firmex
Episode 2: How Finance Scales Growing from 25 to 200+ Employees & Transfer Pricing w/ Les Cullen, Director Finance & Operations at TopHat
Episode 3: Why Finance & Operations go Together & Dealing with the Highly Regulated Financial Services Industry w/ Leen Li, Head of Finance at Wealthsimple
Episode 4: Transitioning from Professional Services to Finance Leader of Pre-Revenue Tech Startup w/ Chris Parkes, CFO at NuraLogix
Episode 5: Difference Between Being an Advisor vs Finance Leader for Tech Startups & When to Raise Capital w/ Eugene Bomba, CFO & VP Operations at Thoughtwire
The Backbone is a podcast hosted by Shubham Datta, that explores the journey inside finance at a startup. Each episode features a finance leader (Director/VP, Finance or CFO) that:
- shares their story of how they entered the world of startups,
- explains what their company does
- describes unique challenges he/she faces in their role
- shares expertise relating to specific topics on the mind of finance leaders
